Electrical oscillators have a wide variety of applications in the prior art. One application, for example, relates to driving ultrasonic devices such as piezo-electric transducers. Such devices may be used in a host of applications including, for example, dental scalers.
It may be useful to operate such an oscillator in a “scanning mode”, in which a frequency of oscillation is periodically changed by a known amount in order to evaluate the performance of the driven device at various operating frequencies. Piezo-electric transducers, for example, operate most efficiently at a resonant frequency at which a current flow through the transducer may be observed to be at a maximum. Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a controller capable of providing scanning frequencies over a defined range, and of “locking in” a corresponding frequency of operation upon receiving an indication that a maximum performance level has been reached.
As transducers are being developed at an increasingly smaller scale, it would further be desirable to have such a controller occupy a small physical space.